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Challenge Ended
where does deja vu come from?
Ended July 7, 2020 • 9 Entries • Created by litterbox
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where does deja vu come from?
Profile avatar image for Mazzmyrrheyes
Mazzmyrrheyes
115 reads

Between the Lines

Each story starts

with just two lines,

in pink

inked

on a stick;

developing an image

in the dark

of mother’s crib —

where spiritual is present

as the body,

formed of flesh,

hides

future sight

from vision

’til it stretches, thin, the mesh —

&

through the window pane,

we fall

like Alice

down the hole,

to chapters

that were written

before eyes

covered

our souls.

Purpose pens the plots,

each path,

(the author

yields free-will

in every choice

between the lines:

heartbeat

to limb leads

still).

’Til deja vu,

a bookmarked page,

illustrates

what’s been,

and destiny

reads right to left,

beginning

from the end.

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where does deja vu come from?
Cover image for post Déjà vu Isn't What You Think It Is, by Danceinsilence
Profile avatar image for Danceinsilence
Danceinsilence
87 reads

Déjà vu Isn’t What You Think It Is

Déjà vu is actually associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. This experience is a neurological anomaly related to epileptic electrical discharge in the brain, creating a strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past.

Some researchers speculate that déjà vu occurs due to a discrepancy in memory systems leading to the inappropriate generation of a detailed memory from a new sensory experience. That is, information bypasses short-term memory and instead reaches long-term memory.

The familiarity is signaled by brain cells in the temporal lobe, but is noticed and ignored by another part of the brain that checks whether all the signals coming to it make sense. The part of the brain that does this checking may well be in the frontal lobe, a part of the brain in from just above your eyes.

Déjà vu is the phenomenon that a person experiences when they feel that they've experienced an event in their past. ... A new study in the journal Brain Stimulation explained a phenomenon epileptic patients experienced where they were able to recall a dream or have a dream-like feeling while awake called déjà rêvé (and am betting that's one you never heard before).

Far be it from me to rain on anyone's parade but déjà vu can be a sign of something more serious — such as epilepsy, mentioned earlier — if you have other symptoms that accompany déjà vu. More often, though, it just means you might need to get a little more sleep or participate in an activity that can help lower your stress levels.

Some call it a gift, others, a curse.

Now the complete opposite is jamais vu, which involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that they have been in the situation before. Jamais vu is sometimes associated with certain types of aphasia, amnesia, and epilepsy.

Déjà vu occurs most often between 15 and 25 years of age and decreases progressively with age.

Thus, if you are between those years and feel akin toward something, the best advice I can give ... see your doctor. For not everything around us is hearts and flowers.

For those past 25 and still claim to have a sense of Déjà vu ... obviously, it is too late to help you. Senility, or Dementia has has claimed you already.

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where does deja vu come from?
Profile avatar image for TomLeah
TomLeah
105 reads

This should not be the first time you have read this post

This post will not be literary although metaphors are needed for scientific enquiry.

We understand the operation of the brain (and by extension the mind) through models of memory. One popular model is that we store our experience of new stimuli in a visuospatial sketchpad, a working memory that lasts for about seven seconds. Imagine remembering that access code sent to your email: you type it perfectly then forget it instantly.

If your experience is novel or essential enough, we might store that in a short-term memory where it will slowly degrade. If we imagine the metaphors of computer storage popular now, then we can liken synaptical storage to the magnetisation of a harddrive. Both will degrade over time. This might be a conversation we have about a project that you know in detail at first, but forget almost entirely a year later.

If we access that short-term memory over several spaced-out times, that information might become encoded into long-term memory. Long-term memory is a stronger synaptical connection that makes the memory less likely to degrade. Models of computers see it as a separate storage space in the brain, something of an external harddrive. Arguably memories stored here are novel or fundamental memories of life experiences.

This model seems to work for most experiences and functions of memory. The cognitive scientists propose versions of this for education and they operate well.

However, memory does not always work like this. Sometimes an experience is instantly encoded into long-term memory at the same time as it is being experienced. The physical sensation of long-term encoding is uncanny, and creates the feeling of deja vu. You physically feel that you have experienced this event before because you are experiencing that event at the instant it happens, and from your long-term memory stores.

While this is just a model, a limited version of reality intended for us to function in the world more effectively, it is a monstrously influential one. The behaviourists, those supremely rich psychologists who plot Facebook algorithms to unsettle us, or to employ new methods of military manipulation, declare their view the only version of reality worth celebrating.

I urge you to read Jung. What we might call ‘genetics’ or ‘DNA’ are all reductionist responses to being human, a quantifiable model of the world that takes one part of reality (that which is outside our heads) and then returns it to us disguised as all of reality, or at least the only part worth talking about.

Deja vu is a spiritual sense as much as a psychological one. It is a patterning of the chaos of life outside our heads. Why do we dream in similar archetypes? Why do we spend our time on prose.com to write scraps of stories for others to experience from across the world? Is it because we know there is more to life than that which the behaviourists tell us?

I hope this is not the first time you have wondered this.

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where does deja vu come from?
Profile avatar image for ColdRamen
ColdRamen
26 reads

deja vu

you know you've seen it before

you don't quite know where

more importantly,

you don't quite know when

it feels like a forgotten memory

suddenly recalled

and leaves like a friend

that only talks to stall

a dream fulfilled

a past life remembered

a course taken

a life lived

in many ways

they come back to us

in short, sweet moments

until suddenly you

remember why

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where does deja vu come from?
Profile avatar image for veewrites
veewrites
19 reads

In Another Life

In another life, we touched like this once. Don’t you remember? I do, well at least I think I do. The first time you held my hand I knew that it would fit perfectly with mine, just like it always did. The memories are buried now, but sometimes I wonder about how happy we were. I want to know how it began and how it ended. I want to know what finally lead me into your arms again. I want to know everything, but for now, I’ll settle for that fleeting feeling that we’ve done this before.

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where does deja vu come from?
Profile avatar image for Sherzod
Sherzod
46 reads

Deja vu...

You shout at a concert of a famous person you love:

it’s a scream of joy!

But you shout at your loved ones for something insignificant:

it’s a scream of anger!

***

When you see a famous person in the distance, you immediately rush to him. You don't care about the distance

But you are too lazy to go to see a friend nearby who is sick. Because you "think" the distance is long

***

You constantly thank people who are strangers to you on social media and express love. You do this every day

But you can never tell your mom "I love you."

You are "ashamed" to do it

***

You try to get signatures from celebrities!

This is happiness for you

But you don’t want to eat from your mother’s hand!

You hate it

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where does deja vu come from?
PholaZamora
24 reads

Recollection

We all remember a time where we stared at something and it just felt eerily familiar. Almost as if you've been in the exact same position before. It's a tingling experience that science itself can't explain.

I've seen it happen though. I stood behind my friend as she danced in the bar in a drunken state, I watched as a transluscent smirking figure posessed her for a moment, only to float away seconds later. I couldn't find it in me to tell her what I saw. I simply chalked it down to the alcohol getting to my head. Maybe it was just floating dust.

But it wasn't. Long after we left the bar, I saw the image over and over again. Ghosts just entering humans for seconds at a time, floating away nonchalantly like nothhing ever happened. One thing I noticed is that the person would always claim to experience some kind of deja vu. I had my suspicions, but that just couldn't be possible, right?

I didn't believe it until it happened to me. I was in an airplane bathroom, just looking at my reflection. I saw the figure enter from behind, but instead of being afraid, I felt a wave of calm rush through me. This has happened before. Everything about the aircraft began to feel familiar - the walls, the windows, even the carpets. It was the textbook definition of deja vu. Yet I knew it couldn't be possible, this was the first time I boarded an aircraft.

"Who are you?" I whispered in my head.

"I am the captain," a hoarse voice whispered back. "I was the captain, before they replaced me. I spent my last moments in this very aircraft. This is my home."

Then he disappeared.

I couldn't relax the whole trip. It was hard to wrap your head around these kinds of things. deja vu isn't just a product of our own brains, or even the things we saw in another life, it was ghosts entering our bodies so they could experience things from a human point of view once again. And I don't know if that saddens me or terrifies me. I never told a single soul after that, not even when my friends mentioned it, not even when it happened again.

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where does deja vu come from?
SafeHaven7
29 reads

Deja-Vu

Whenever you time travel to the past, your brain remembers a little about the future. So when you repeat the same events you did before you went to the past, you get Deja-Vu. This is most likely also the way people get the power to tell the future.

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where does deja vu come from?
Profile avatar image for acaciatulane
acaciatulane
20 reads

“I’m No Prophet,” Yes, You Are.

Deja Vu is the recognition of a moment that you subconsciously knew would occur. We don’t see that we are our own prophets until the moment comes. Deja Vu is not a warning, it’s simply an occurrence that is familiar because of the fact that you knew it would happen. I believe that there are layers to the mind, almost like an onion: some are so far in that they’re forgotten about or overlooked. We think we’ve seen things before because we have. What do you think?

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